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Swinging Single

Representing Sexuality in the 1960s

1999

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Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett, editors

Explores the portrayal of sexuality within the popular culture, events, and films of the 1960s.

These essays attribute the new sexual mores of the 1960s to a confluence of social, cultural, and economic factors that encouraged personal gratification and altered traditionally defined gender roles. Topics include the commercialization of avant-garde and exploitation films; new visions of female sexuality in That Girl and The Avengers; the social context of such cultural icons as Hugh Hefner and Charles Manson; the intersection of race and sexuality in Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice; and depictions of sexual pleasure in pornography and scientific films.

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Explores the portrayal of sexuality within the popular culture, events, and films of the 1960s .

Critics and defenders alike connect today’s widespread anxieties about sexuality and culture to the political activism of the 1960s and the counterculture’s preoccupation with the individual pursuit of pleasure. In contrast, the essays in Swinging Single attribute the new sexual mores of that era not to its political upheavals but to a confluence of social, cultural, and economic factors that encouraged personal gratification and altered traditionally defined gender roles.

Contributors analyze a broad range of topics: the commercialization of avant-garde and exploitation films; new visions of female sexuality in That Girl and The Avengers; the social context of such cultural icons as Hugh Hefner and Charles Manson; the intersection of race and sexuality in Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice; and depictions of sexual pleasure in pornography and scientific films.

Hilary Radner is associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theater at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Shopping Around: Feminine Culture and the Pursuit of Pleasure (1995) and coeditor of Film Theory Goes to the Movies (1993) and Constructing the New Consumer Society (1997). Moya Luckett is assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

“Swinging Single is a fascinating and unruly collection of articles about representation of sexuality in the 1960s. Ranging from the most middle-American popular culture to a variety of oppositional or underground cultures and figures, the very diversity of the collection’s subject matter illustrates the complexity of the sexual landscape in the era of ‘the sexual revolution.’” American Studies

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